Via Bloomberg News, we will continue to see the effects of the “extend and pretend” philosophy of propping up failing banks for a very long time. It’s a shame that the European Union isn’t learning from our mistakes, either:

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

You’re officially an old fart when your life begins to center around your illnesses, and trying to stay alive to the end of the last quarter. I just have one more day of antibiotics, and then I’m done. Tomorrow I’m going to my state rep’s office to see if I can’t badger them into expediting my application into the state’s pre-existing condition insurance plan, so I can get this stone-filled gall bladder out.

I know so many people in despair right now that I feel almost apologetic for complaining about my health. Yeah, I’m sick but… there’s a roof over my head and food in the house. Not so bad!